"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD
Traditional book publishers were decimated by the arrival of Amazon, which aggressively pursued them, in the words of Bezos, “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and local police.
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/bill-gates-zuckerberg-jeff-bezos.html
"GOP estb. is using the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide up to four blue/white-collar cheap-labor programs in lame-duck DHS budget. Donors are worried that salaries are too damn high, & estb. media does not want to know."
TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA
Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA CRONIES, BIDEN CRONIES
Amazon WORKS FOR BIDEN, OR DOES HE WORK FOR JEFF BEZOS?
Walmart
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide.
While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages
and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent
of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by
2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019...watch thoses numbers go up with Bidenomics!
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.
At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.
By Gabriel Black
The massive increase in the value of the stock market, which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America combined last year.
The father of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just completed the most expensive purchase of a living artist’s work in US history, spending over $91 million on a three-foot-tall metallic sculpture. Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund Citadel, recently dropped $238 million on a penthouse in New York City, the most expensive US home ever purchased. And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has invested $42 million in a 10,000-year clock (BEZOS OWNS ABOUT $300 IN RESIDENTIAL PROPERTIES HE CONSIDERS HIS HOMES THESE INCLUDE $135 MILLION MANSION IN BEVERLY HILLS, A $40 MILLION DOLLAR TOWNHOUSE IN D.C. AND $100 MILLION IN CONDOS IN NYC).
European Commission accuses Amazon of violating antitrust rules
The European Commission (EC) has accused Amazon of violating antitrust rules by using third-party sellers’ non-public data to benefit its own retail business. The charge appears in a November 10 statement following an investigation that the EC’s antitrust regulators initiated in July 2019.
The European proceedings against Amazon are a shot across the bow of American imperialism. The national bourgeoisies of Europe are reacting to the provocative “America First” trade war policies of the Trump administration and threatening to retaliate, asserting their own interests.
The EC also has opened a second investigation into whether Amazon selects vendors to appear in its “Buy Box” in a way that benefits its own retail, logistics, or delivery services. The Buy Box appears prominently on Amazon’s site and allows customers to add a specific seller’s item to their shopping carts.
In describing Amazon’s anticompetitive practices, the statement specifically refers to France and Germany, which are Amazon’s biggest European markets. As governments have shut down nonessential businesses during the pandemic, customers have increased their online shopping. Among online shoppers, more than 70 percent in France and more than 80 percent in Germany have bought an item on Amazon during the past year, according to Margrethe Vestager, the European Union commissioner responsible for competition.
Amazon is a trillion-dollar multinational conglomerate that not only dominates commerce over the internet, but also develops its own products (such as e-readers, clothing, and toys) for sale on that same market. Since Amazon not only sells products but controls the marketplace where those products compete with those of other businesses, it has a colossal advantage over its competitors.
As a marketplace, Amazon has access to third-party vendors’ non-public business data. It can view, for example, the number of a given product that has been ordered and shipped, a seller’s revenue, information about shipping, and data on sellers’ past performance. The EC found that such marketplace data have been shared with Amazon’s retail business and used as a basis for decisions about its own products. “The use of non-public marketplace seller data allows Amazon to avoid the normal risks of retail competition,” according to the EC.
The other investigation focuses on the Buy Box, which shows a single vendor’s offer for a given product. Vendors compete to have their offers featured in the Buy Box, which allows them to reach users of Amazon Prime (Amazon’s customer loyalty program), who tend to spend more and shop more often than non-Prime customers. About 80 percent of sales on Amazon result from the Buy Box, according to industry experts, and the number of Prime users is growing. The commission is investigating whether the criteria Amazon uses to select sellers for this box favor Amazon’s own retail business or the sellers that use Amazon’s logistics and delivery services.
Not surprisingly, Amazon released a statement expressing its disagreement with the EC’s allegations, denying that it views individual sellers’ data but admitting that it sometimes views “aggregate” data.
The company interprets the terms “individual” and “aggregate” in creative ways. For example, because the company Fortem represented 99.95 percent of sales of car trunk organizers (and not all sales), Amazon considered data related to that company to be aggregate data, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amazon used Fortem’s non-public data to develop its own private-label version of the same product.
What is more, former Amazon employees have admitted publicly that the company engages in this practice. One of the company’s former product management workers told the Capitol Forum, “I used to pull sellers’ data to look at what the best products were when I was there…. That was my job.”
Other public information substantiates the EC’s claims about Amazon’s manipulation of the Buy Box. Jeff Bezos, the company’s CEO and the world’s richest man, admitted during a US Congressional hearing in July that the criteria for spotlighting sellers in the Buy Box “indirectly” favor product offers that can be shipped with Prime.
European regulators are not alone in scrutinizing Amazon. The United States Congress and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also are investigating the company’s relationship with third-party vendors. In a report that it issued in October, the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee found that Amazon has monopoly power over third-party sellers. In testimony before the subcommittee, one such seller said that he had been forced out of the business after Amazon copied his products (including even their color scheme), sold its versions at lower prices, and featured them in the Buy Box.
Other third-party vendors told the antitrust subcommittee that they have “no choice” but to pay for Fulfillment by Amazon, the company’s logistics and delivery service. Using this service makes a product eligible to be sold to Prime customers and helps companies “to maintain a favorable search result position, to reach Amazon’s more than 112 million Prime members, and to win the Buy Box,” according to the subcommittee’s report.
Like the subcommittee, the FTC has interviewed Amazon’s third-party sellers. However, few details about its investigation are available, and the FTC has taken no meaningful action to restrain the growth of the conglomerate or its domination over the American market.
The United States has various laws, dating from the late-19th and early-20th centuries, that restrict the formation of monopolies and outlaw unfair competition. But this regulatory framework is effectively a dead letter. There has been little in the way of enforcement action for nearly four decades, after AT&T was broken up in 1982. The Amazon conglomerate, controlled by Bezos, invades and conquers one sector of the economy after another with impunity.
If the EC concludes that Amazon has broken antitrust rules, it could fine the company as much as 10 percent of its annual worldwide revenue. Such a fine would equal $28 billion if based on 2019 revenues and $37 billion if based on the company’s revenue forecasts for this year. For context, the latter figure is approximately equal to the gross domestic product of Paraguay in 2019.
An alternative would be for the EC to demand behavioral remedies in the form of prohibitions on certain business conduct. Amazon could well decide to ignore such remedies and simply pay fines if it is caught. The vast company can afford to treat the occasional fine as a cost of doing business. It also is entirely possible that the EC will come to a settlement with Amazon or drop its case entirely.
The investigations by the EC and by the Congressional subcommittee underscore Amazon’s incredible size and dominance. During the second quarter of 2020, Amazon had an operating profit of $5.8 billion. In October, Amazon’s share price reached approximately $3,000, which gave it a market valuation of about $1.5 trillion. This valuation is greater than that of Wal-Mart, Target, Salesforce, IBM, eBay, and Etsy put together, according to the subcommittee’s report.
Amazon’s dominance is neither the result of Bezos’s genius nor a fluke. It is the result of an objective process. “The general framework of formally recognized free competition remains, but the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.”
The solution is not to rely on capitalist governments to restrain this process with anti-monopoly regulations. Instead, workers must openly declare as their aim the transformation of technology monopolies like Amazon into public utilities democratically controlled by the working class that can be mobilized to satisfy social need around the world, rather than further enriching the world’s richest man
Amazon’s 25th anniversary: A conglomerate based on parasitism and exploitation
Last week, Amazon commemorated its 25th anniversary. From its beginnings in a garage in Seattle, Washington, Amazon has grown into a multinational technology conglomerate with a market capitalization of nearly one trillion dollars.In 1994, future Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos left his job at hedge fund D.E. Shaw to get out in front of the possibilities opened up by the accelerating development of the internet, beginning with the modest idea of an online bookstore. Bezos went on to become the wealthiest man on the planet, his hoard by one estimate peaking at a record $157 billion before his assets were divided in a divorce earlier this year.
Now considered one of the “Big Four” technology monopolies alongside Apple, Google and Facebook, Amazon controls the largest marketplace on the Internet: Amazon.com. The conglomerate’s reach extends from Whole Foods Market, which Amazon purchased in 2017 for $13.4 billion, to consumer electronics such as the Kindle reader and the voice-controlled Alexa. Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems announced in April of this year that it will spend a decade launching 3,236 satellites into space to provide broadband internet.
Traditional book publishers were decimated by the arrival of Amazon, which aggressively pursued them, in the words of Bezos, “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” Using its vast flows of cash, Amazon ruthlessly undercut its rivals, from neighborhood stores to diaper manufacturers, accepting losses in order to drive competitors out of its way. Meanwhile, Amazon demanded and obtained free money from state and local governments in the form of tax breaks and other concessions.
Amazon’s annual revenues reached $233 billion in 2018, on which the conglomerate is expected to pay zero federal income tax. To put this figure in perspective, these revenues are nearly at the level of the annual tax revenue of Russia, which amounted to $253.9 billion in US dollars in 2017. Amazon’s revenues are higher than the government revenues of Turkey ($173.9 billion), Austria ($197.8 billion), Poland ($90.8 billion) and Iran ($77.2 billion).
Nearly half of American households now have subscriptions to Amazon Prime. The click of a mouse on a personal computer, or the tap of a finger on a mobile device, now sets into motion the speedy delivery of commodities from around the world, or the instantaneous electronic transmission of a film, song or book. Behind these deceptively simple transactions lies Amazon’s vast and complex commercial, logistics, distribution and computing empire.
Promising advances have indeed been made in automation and artificial intelligence. These technological advances carry with them tremendous liberating potential for human civilization as a whole. Heavy and repetitive toil by humans can increasingly be mitigated by robots, and possibilities appear on the horizon for advanced levels of coordination and integration around the world, assisted by artificial intelligence.
But under capitalism, new advances in technology have made possible new techniques of exploitation. Amazon has become a watchword for a new kind of despotism in the workplace.
In Amazon “fulfillment centers,” workers are forbidden to carry cellphones or to talk to each other. They are searched coming in and out, and minute details of their activity throughout the workday are tracked. Amazon specializes in putting constant pressure on workers to move as fast as possible, with electronic devices constantly prompting and prodding them to complete the next task.
Workers are instructed to compete with each other to surpass each other’s rates, which they are admonished constitutes “fun.” Arbitrarily high rates are demanded, and then raised, and then raised again. A worker who takes a moment to rest, to drink water, or to go to the bathroom can be criticized for a diminished rate. The workers who are deemed too slow, or who simply tire out, are replaced.
Amazon is now the second-largest employer in the United States, and there are around 647,000 Amazon workers worldwide. Journalist John Cassidy, writing about Amazon in The New Yorker in 2015, commented: “Behind all the technological advances and product innovation, there is a good deal of old-fashioned labor discipline, wage repression, and exertion of management power.”
Over the past week, we published an article exposing the injury of 567 workers over a two-year period at Amazon’s DFW-7 fulfillment center near Fort Worth, Texas. In December of last year, the WSWS reported how Amazon had hired a private detective to spy on 27-year-old worker Michelle Quinones in an effort to block compensation for her injury.
Amazon has appeared in the “Dirty Dozen” list maintained by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) for two years in a row. The 2019 report highlights six worker deaths in seven months, 13 deaths since 2013, “a high incidence of suicide attempts, workers urinating in bottles and workers left without resources or income after on-the-job injuries.”
Amazon’s techniques are merely a refined expression of conditions being imposed on workers around the world. In March of this year, Ford Motor Company announced the hiring of its new chief financial officer, Tim Stone, who previously served as Amazon’s vice president of finance and the leader of the Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods. Stone was hired as Ford carries out brutal cost-cutting in the US, Europe and around the world.
There is no shortage of opposition among Amazon workers. On social media, current and former Amazon workers are contacting each other, looking for ways to fight back. In Poland, where Amazon workers make around $5 per hour, Amazon walked out of negotiations on July 2 with two unions over working conditions, setting the stage for a strike.
To fight for their interests, Amazon workers cannot allow their struggles to be corralled and smothered by the pro-capitalist trade unions, which are doing everything they can to block a fight against inequality and exploitation.
In 25 years, Amazon produced the biggest individual fortune in history, and it did so on the backs of hundreds of thousands of workers. Amazon’s trajectory represents an “accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital.”
Not just Bezos, but many others have enriched themselves or stand to enrich themselves from Amazon’s rise. Wall Street has its fingers in the pie. The Vanguard Group currently owns $55 billion of Amazon stock, BlackRock owns $45 billion and FMR owns $30 billion.
The parasitic activities of Amazon, through which it has sought to appropriate for itself the surplus value accumulated by other companies, have been integrated with the financial parasitism of the American economy. Amazon’s own stock has been buoyed ever higher as part of the speculative mania on Wall Street.
Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and local police.
In 2013, Bezos personally purchased, and now operates, the Washington Post, which has been a main media voice for the Democratic Party’s anti-Russia campaign and the overall interests of American imperialism.
The increasing integration of Amazon with the repressive apparatus of the state, while its tentacles stretch into every corner of society.
Amazon must be placed under public ownership and democratic control. It must be taken out of the hands of the financial oligarchy and transformed into a public utility. The technology and infrastructure behind Amazon’s meteoric trajectory and the biggest individual fortune in modern history must be turned towards the needs and aspirations of the world’s population as a whole.
This program can only be achieved through the mobilization of the working class on an international scale on the basis of a fight to overthrow the capitalist system and establish a democratically-controlled socialist economy, run on the basis of social need, not private profit.
ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER…. Amazon’s JEFF BEZOS PLAN FOR A NEW AMERICAN SLAVERY
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/amazon-billionaire-jeff-bezos-says-fuck.html
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
Traditional book publishers were decimated by the arrival of Amazon, which aggressively pursued them, in the words of Bezos, “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
AMAZON’S ASSAULT ON AMERICA CONTINUES
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/05/modern-slaver-jeff-bezos-of-amazon.html
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Today, each of the top 5 billionaires owns as much as 750 million people, more than the total population of Latin America and double the population of the US."
“A comprehensive new report released Sunday by the New York-based labor rights watchdog China Labor Watch (CLW) has shed new light on the barbaric and illegal practices that Amazon employs to boost its profits by driving down production costs on the backs of factory workers at the company’s electronics assembly plants in China.”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/hundreds-of-miserably-paid-employees-at.html
“A comprehensive new report released Sunday by the New York-based labor rights watchdog China Labor Watch (CLW) has shed new light on the barbaric and illegal practices that Amazon employs to boost its profits by driving down production costs on the backs of factory workers at the company’s electronics assembly plants in China.”
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
AMAZON’S JEFF BEZOS IS THE FACE OF MODERN SLAVERY!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-face-of-evil-jeff-bezos-assault-on.html
The gains for employees are a novel pain for the investors and employers who have been able to hold down wages for decades because the federal government is trying to grow the economy via cheap-labor legal immigration.
“INVESTORS” HAVE AND WILL DESTROY THIS NATION IF IT WOULD IMPACT THE NEXT QUARTER’S EARNINGS!
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
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